While I’ve finished this portion of the Via Francigena, my habits on the VF continue. One habit is to pay attention to my feelings as elicited by my surroundings. So, here in Annecy, France, I’m paying attention to sadness.

In Annecy, fifteen days ago a knife-wielding Christian Syrian refugee attacked four toddlers and children. Thankfully, they have survived. No reason for his attacks have been disclosed. As one article suggests all hypotheses are open, temporary insanity, agony of exile, after-effects of war in Syria, or family crisis.

Two days ago, I left Chamonix, France, where in 2015 a co-pilot intentionally flew an Airbus into an area around Mt. Blanc. Sad. About a month ago, I visited Clairvaux, France, home of St. Bernard’s Clairvaux Abbey ( who is a later St. Bernard than the St. Bernard at the Pass). On a tour, I not only learned about this Cistercian monastery, but also about Napoleon in 1808 converting much of the abbey into a prison. Through the decades, some notorious prisoners such as Carlos the Jackel have been held in this high-security prison. Because the prison is scheduled to be closed by the end of 2023, only six prisoners are currently held. One prisoner is Salem Abdelsan of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks (where 130 unsuspecting people were killed including many in the Bataclan Concert Hall). Sad.

During the past years, I stayed, unknowingly at the time of my booking, at one of the Mumbai hotels targeted in the 2008 terrorist attacks; I’ve used the same London Underground stations where the 2005 terrorist attacks took place; and I’ve walked through the Madrid train stations, locations of the 2004 bombings. Seeing the toy stuffed animals at the Annecy playground feet from beautiful Lake Annecy, I am reminded of these other events.

Without being morbid, I feel sad. In these situations, sadness recognizes acts which have resulted in deep pain for others, and the deep pain which is spread unevenly around the globe. For me, it is a low grade feeling, a spreading feeling that recognizes that my own sadness is nothing compared to the feelings of those affected by these and other specific events. I understand in part how it can turn into rage; I understand in part how it can turn into “survivor guilt.” I’m too far removed for those feelings.

My sadness isn’t weariness; my sadness isn’t despair. On the one hand, I associate weariness with my mother. Mom lived about four years after my father’s death. Married for 50 years, she gradually lost the desire to live after his death. One vivid memory that I have is our taking young Charles and Dwight to visit her. Upon arrival, she lay on the sofa; she nodded, she slowly chatted; however, within 30 minutes, she laid back down, turned her back to us, and to her grandchildren, and faced the wall. “Mom, don’t you want to talk to your grandkids some more?” No answer. She was pulling back into her enclosed world. Looking back on that event, I only saw the immediate situation. I only could make the immediate judgment that Mom should be acting differently. I could only see the situation from my point of view. Only later did I see it differently. Mom had seen a death of a sister in child-birth; Mom had experienced the death of her first husband six months after their marriage; Mom and her sister Georgia had been painfully kidnapped. While Mom was released, Aunt Georgia was held for a number of hours. Those are only the events of Mom’s pain that I know. At the point of our family visit, Mom saw life from a different point. She was tired; she was weary. That weariness was leading her to withdraw from life, from those whom previously she had so deeply loved and cared about. My sadness is different from her weariness of life itself.

On the other hand, my sadness is not despair. Certain despair sees only dead ends. These dead ends bring harm to oneself or others. I associate despair with an incident related to me in 2017 by a Palestinian Christian woman who leads an organization helping Palestinians in Bethlehem. Her organization had recently begun helping a woman and her children, including a newborn baby. The woman had only recently become a widow. Despairing that he could no longer provide for his family, despairing of the situation in which Palestinians found themselves, her husband had just committed suicide, as a suicide bomber. In the conversation, the agency coordinator explained that, at least, in death, the husband felt that he could do something which would not result in shame, but in noble sacrifice. Out of despair, the young father sought to create something more. My sadness is not despair.

In all of these events, there are so many other issues. At the basic level of understanding, it is necessary to look at these events through the eyes of the victims, of surviving family and friends, through the eyes of perpetrators, of the eyes of those who knew the perpetrators, through the eyes of strangers who read about the events and move on. It is necessary to think about the layers of causes of these events. It is necessary to think about the punitive and the rehabilitative actions which are needed. While I don’t think that we can have a society of strangers without attributing responsibility to individuals, how we understand and respond to these situations is multi-faceted and varied. All of these issues, and more, are issues which are part of all of the situations that I’ve mentioned.

Today, I simply want to acknowledge a feeling of sadness. My feeling is low-grade. It is like a child coloring her drawing with only an off-color gray. Not an intense gray. But everything is a pervasive gray. While I know that the feeling will pass, I also know that the feeling is telling me that there are events in life which harm, which frustrate life’s joys, which are even irreversible. As I mentioned, part of my walking the Via Francigena is paying attention to my feelings, not to wallow in them, but to allow them to help me recognize something about the world around me, the world which I share.

Obviously, I’m not the first, you’re not the first, to have these feelings. In his thirtieth writing, that ancient writer admits to being “sad and tired.” In his one-hundred-and-nineteenth writing, he writes more intensely “I have grown weary with crying; my throat is raw…I am full of heaviness.” Sadness is real. But thankfully, we may feel more than sadness.